So I like it both ways. Flying on Japanese airlines, which for me tends to be ANA, you get impeccable service. The flight attendants are young, exquisite, totally attentive and smilingly demure.

Flying American airlines , which for me tends to be United, the attendants are more advanced in years, tend to be slightly ditsy and laugh their way across the Pacific. I have been attended to by the same lady on various US – Tokyo flights. She is a redhead wisecracker, probably in her 50s, called Cathy who maintains an atmosphere of, “This is really fun, what the heck , you wanna another drink? Where are we? Hell, I don’t know!” as we slam across the stratosphere.  She is my hero.

Leaving Chicago

Downtown Montreal

This an American flight

Nihon!
19 hours on planes today.

Two very different styles, both of which are wonderful. So no one thing is necessarily better than another. What does God think about this? Let’s ask Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Glory be to God for dappled things –

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

Yay!